College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers(Taylor & Francis, 2017-06-22) Granqvist, Pehr; Sroufe, L. Alan; Dozier, Mary; Hesse, Erik; Steele, Miriam; van Ijzendoorn, Marinus; Solomon, Judith; Schuengel, Carlo; Fearon, Pasco; Bakermans-Kranenburg, Marian; Steele, Howard; Cassidy, Jude; Carlson, Elizabeth; Madigan, Sheri; Jacobvitz, Deborah; Foster, Sarah; Behrens, Kazuko; Rifkin-Graboi, Anne; Gribneau, Naomi; Spangler, Gottfried; Ward, Mary J; True, Mary; Spieker, Susan; Reijman, Sophie; Reisz, Samantha; Tharner, Anne; Nkara, Frances; Goldwyn, Ruth; Sroufe, June; Pederson, David; Pederson, Deanne; Weigand, Robert; Siegel, Daniel; Dazzi, Nino; Bernard, Kristin; Fonagy, Peter; Waters, Everett; Toth, Sheree; Cicchetti, Dante; Zeanah, Charles H; Lyons-Ruth, Karlen; Main, Mary; Duschinsky, RobbieDisorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of pathology, and (4) represents a fixed or static “trait” of the child, impervious to development or help. This paper summarizes the evidence showing that these four assumptions are false and misleading. The paper reviews what is known about disorganized infant attachment and clarifies the implications of the classification for clinical and welfare practice with children. In particular, the difference between disorganized attachment and attachment disorder is examined, and a strong case is made for the value of attachment theory for supportive work with families and for the development and evaluation of evidence-based caregiving interventions.Item Infants' representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions(2013) Sherman, Laura Jernigan; Cassidy, Jude; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)According to several theorists, infants form mental representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions (e.g., Bowlby, 1969/1982), but very few studies have investigated these claims. Across two studies, I hypothesized that 10-month-old infants would form representations and memories of their social-emotional interactions. In Study 1, infants (N = 24) were familiarized to a positive and negative puppet and their representations and memories were assessed with visual-paired comparison (VPC) and forced-choice tests. Ten minutes after their interactions, but not immediately after, significantly more infants chose the positive puppet (17/24, p = .030). To better understand these results, I conducted another study in which infants (N = 32) were randomly assigned to be familiarized to either a positive and neutral puppet or a negative and neutral puppet. In the positive condition infants were more likely to choose the positive puppet immediately after (12/16, p =.038), but not 10 minutes after the interactions, whereas in the negative condition infants' choices were at chance - but older infants were more likely choose the neutral puppet (Mdiff = 11.50 days, p = .022). In both studies, no effects emerged with infants' preferential looking. Overall, the results indicated that infants' representations and memories of their brief social-emotional interactions were stronger for positive than negative interactions. Results are discussed with regard to existing theory and research and the negativity bias hypothesis.Item Comparing Me to You: Comparison Between Novel and Familiar Goal-Directed Actions Facilitates Goal Extraction and Imitation(2011) Gerson, Sarah A.; Woodward, Amanda L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recognizing the goals of others' actions is critical for much of human development and social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. In this dissertation, I explore a new mechanism I believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of novel actions---comparison. In four studies, I examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action (through physical alignment of the two actions) helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. In Studies 1 and 2, 7-month-old infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goals of an experimenter's tool use actions. In contrast, infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, learned the associations between claw and toys, or interacted in a socially contingent manner with the experimenter using the claw did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. Study 3 replicated the finding that engagement in physical alignment facilitated goal extraction and imitation and indicated that this was true for older infants (10-month-olds). It also demonstrated that observation of the same physical alignment did not lead to goal imitation at this age. Finally, Study 4 revealed that 10-month-old infants could learn about the goals of novel actions through the observation of physical alignment when a cue to focus on the goal of the two actions was presented during the alignment process (i.e., a verbal label), indicating that infants gained a conceptual representation of the goal and used structure mapping to extract the common goal between actions. Infants who heard a non-label vocalization during the observation of physical alignment did not later imitate the experimenter's goals. The nature, breadth, and implications of these findings are discussed. Together, these findings indicate that infants can extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison processes; comparison could thus have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge.